Without having to deal with the gravity well, at what tech level could you build spaceships?
Let's say we have a society that for some reason (a MacGuffin, Unobtanium, Handwavium, whatever) have found a way to travel off the earth without having to fight gravity along the way. They can travel into orbit as easily as they can sail the seas or travel along a road.
What kind of technologies would they need in order to get into orbit and travel around the Earth from space? Space is still a cold, radioactive vacuum so there are still a bunch of hurdles of overcome.
But from what I know, the biggest hurdle has been (and still is) the prohibitive cost and difficulty of pushing something away from the Earth. So if we remove it...
- Could we have medieval vessels in space? (I seriously doubt this)
- Could (adapted) 19th century Ironclads make it?
- Could a WWI era warship do it?
- Or would we only shave a few years off the technology requirements?
What hurdles would still need to be overcome? When could it be done?
These vessels being able to reach any kind of stellar body isn't a requirement by the way. Chugging around in orbit is more than enough for what I had in mind.
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Space isn't exactly cold. It isn't hot either, because a vacuum can't be either.
Heat regulation is actually a big problem because of that vacuum, since heat can't be radiated off into the air. It would be like putting something into a vacuum thermos bottle. The heat on the inside stays on the inside except for a bit that radiates off as IR.
Being air tight is of course important, along with a way to filter out carbon dioxide.
I read somewhere that the theory of why air was important was around in the middle ages, though what made air good or bad was still a mystery. With antigravity allowing for flight early on, they probably would have figured it out sooner since hypoxia from traveling to high to quickly would have surfaced really early.
Radioactivity could be dealt with by sheathing the ship with lead, since weight isn't an issue. This of course mean's that they have to have a theory of radioactivity, which was discovered by Marie Curie in our timeline. Before that people would have gotten sick, and not had a clue why. This may have been harder to discover than the theory of gasses.
However, as long as they stay in low earth orbit, inside of the Van Allen Belt (1000 km), radiation will be less of an issue.
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